2014B Day 35: Let It Go

This was our night:

Cars on the Pan-Am while we were closed.

We were closed for the first 7 or so hours of the night. I got some software maintenance done, and at one point I went out into the dome to see what was going on. I found Laird and Katie with their heads inside the instrument.

Uh oh, looks like something funny is going on up thereThey were measuring stuff.

We finally got to open at about 3 am. In this GIF the red dot is us (Clay) and the blue dot is Baade. We opened at the same time and, it looks like we’re running away from the clouds.

This is what it looked like when we finally opened.

Because of the clouds we had to find very bright stars. When we pointed at Betelgeuse, Alberto (our Telescope Operator) turned to us and said “do you have a finding chart?”. That’s a joke — on faint stars you often have to work out which star of two or three is your target. As you can see, there was only one star in this case.

Betelguese melting the guider.At sunrise, this was the sky. These kinds of clouds are hard to see in the dark … but they make AO observing hell.

Amazingly, the sky finally really started to clear at sunrise. After breakfast, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The next result is the only photometric image we took tonight.

Katie is pointing at the clear sky overhead at sunrise. The only clear sky all night.

Here you can see the result of all the moist (for here) air that blew over us tonight.

The aftermath of tonights weather is evident down on the valley floor

I guess I don’t really feel one with the wind and sky, but the past is in the past.